A Comparative Study of Salish and Nivkh

For my senior capstone project, I conducted research on the Salish and Nivkh languages. Salish is a Native American language of the Pacific Northwest consisting of 23 dialects, and Nivkh is a Paleo-Siberian language, which consists of four dialects from the Sakhalin Island of Russia. Both are highly endangered languages with very few fluent speakers left. Past research has suggested a connection between these languages, and I investigated the topic in English, Russian, and Salish to determine specific details of this connection. For example, both languages do not have grammatical gender, and both include a hand/ finger suffix in their numerals.